Meh, quests don't work and it barely looks any better since it uses the original textures. The only big improvement I saw was the grass.
Hell, with the right texture mods you can make Morrowind look better than this in its original engine. Which raises another point: even if they got quests working and made higher-res textures, you probably still wouldn't be able to use any of the amazing mods that really bring the Morrowind world to life and increase its replay value enormously.
If I can't have: - The library outside of the capital that pays to copy your books - Some of the great companion mods - The option to play on the Sixth House's side (should have been in the vanilla game, really) - Slaver Guild/slave-rescuer factions (again, should have been in the vanilla game) - Extra NPC and NPC schedule mods - Harder faction progression/higher House joining standards mods
If you just need backups and/or quick (but not automatic) access to your files on other systems, consider simple USB flash drives. They're tiny and fairly cheap--I think my 16GB one cost like $30. Even 64GB ones aren't that expensive, and are great for having your data with you everywhere and at all times, with or without a 'net connection. Durable, too, and even pretty damn water resistant (assuming they're not plugged in when they are immersed)
I read Adler's How to Read a Book a couple of years ago. In it, Adler claims that the best text from which to learn a principle is that written by the person who discovered it--so, as you say, you read Euclid's elements for Euclidean geometry, some Archimedes for conic sections, some Lavoisier for chemistry, etc.
My initial reaction on reading this was to reject the idea; after all, why should the person who first discovered something be the best one at conveying the idea to others? That didn't strike me as being necessarily true.
I've continued to struggle with Adler's notions, and I've since decided that I agree, though I'm not sure whether it's for the same reasons as him. Reading Lockhart's paper a few weeks ago and slowly working through E.T. Bell's Men of Mathematics has led me to the conclusion that the raw facts and processes of science and mathematics are often less important for (especially young) students than the processes by which discoveries are made; the way the discoverer came to understand a principle is often more important to grasp than the principle itself.
I'm still not sure if that's what Adler meant (if not, then I still disagree with his reasoning--I don't think he elaborated much on what led him to this conclusion in How to Read a Book) but I've come to agree that the classics in math and science do matter, even if the raw facts and processes are better-described elsewhere.
The big buzz word/trendy strategy in elementary-level teaching right now is "differentiated instruction". What it means is teaching a single concept at several levels of difficulty simultaneously. It's sort of like ability grouping into different classes like you talk about, but all in one classroom and with one teacher (and maybe a TA or Para or some such).
It's actually pretty good when it's done right, but as far as I can tell most elementary school teachers are awful at coming up with effective differentiated lesson plans. Many just think it's impossible and refuse to even try. I expect it to go away in a few years, just like most of the other trendy teaching ideas since, well, forever ago. Maybe we'll move toward having separate ability-grouped classes after it fails.
Bingo, and that's one of the big problems with trying to do anything about the issues the paper raises: there are only so many people with the 1) ability, 2) knowledge, and 3) inclination, to do the kind of real mathematics he's talking about.
We'd have to re-vamp our teacher training along the lines of what's talked about in the paper to try to increase the number of people who could do it, and hope Lockhart's right about this being an art with universal appeal so that enough of the teacher candidates "get" it. Even if elementary schools began using dedicated math teachers (some already do, but many don't) we'd still need a shitload of people trained in this "math as an art/math as play" style, and we currently have approximately zero in elementary education.
... and the cheaters can watch the Super Special ending on Youtube, just like the JRPG gamers who aren't bored enough to do whatever dumb bullshit you need to do (which would usually be impossible to figure out without looking at a guide) to get the super special double-plus happy ending do after they beat the game with the "good, but you didn't find 7 widgets in the Blargle dungeon and spend 40 hours mining Mithryl to turn them in to Super Widgets, so not perfect" ending.
Another part was the part where you have to take down the helicopter in the speed boat. It took me forever to finally do it, but MAN did it feel good when I did. That fucking helicopter had been a constant annoyance throughout that entire section of the game, and watching it fall felt GOOD!
Easily the hardest part of the game, IMO. You can sort-of cheat by leaving your boat up in the cave you come out of, running out until you trigger the chopper, then running back to the boat. You can hide from its guns in the cave and hit it when it drops in to view. Tedious, but less so than dying 10x trying to beat it legitimately.
Personally, I consider it a fair maneuver since the devs gave the chopper a Bin of Infinite Holding for its bombs (it's not long before the damn thing has released more mass and volume worth of bombs than the is in the chopper itself), and made it so much harder to kill than every other identical chopper in the game.
Already have a PS2. Both are getting FFXIII, and the 360 had the new Star Ocean as an exclusive, so that pretty much sealed it. IIRC, the PS3 only has 2-3 exclusive RPGs so far, and I think at least one is a tactical RPG, which is a sub-genre we don't usually play. The couple RPGs on the PS3 that looked to be the best out so far were also available on the 360.
I felt dirty buying it, and despite the fact that it's one of the newer systems I can't shake the feeling that it'll suddenly die on us in a month or two, and I don't really like the controller... but in the end we decided we probably wouldn't use the Blu Ray feature much, and all but 2-3 games we wanted to play were cross-platform or 360 exclusive (guess I'll have to borrow from a friend to play MGS4). No wireless, which sucks. I don't really like the system, but it's where the games are, unfortunately.
If you want to do all the tasks done by Unite but easier, get cheap or free web hosting and a Facebook page.
I can set up 40GB+ of music to play via a decent-looking web interface for anyone I send a password and URL to in less than a minute and with 5 or 6 clicks using my Facebook account and some shared web hosting? 'Cuz I did that earlier today with Opera Unite.
I went in to this skeptical, and I barely even used Opera before this (I'm a web developer and, though I admire Opera, I need the tools available in Firefox) but it only took about 5 minutes of tinkering with this thing for me to be sold on it. I believe my exact words on testing the media sharing were "whoa, fuckin' cool!"
Yeah, the current gen is really lacking for single-machine multiplayer (except the Wii).
Also, as a primarily-PC gamer who just bought his first next-gen system yesterday, I'd like to say:
How can you console gamers put up with this? Expensive hardware, so many confusing options and add-ons, having to keep up with game patches and system updates... ugh, I think I'll just go back to the PC where it's so much simpler:)
Hahaha, damn it felt good to type that.
(for the record, I bought a 360--it would have been a PS3, but my wife loves RPGs and there are way more of them on the 360, which is a total reversal from the last generation)
Even if the US government is required to trade a $20 bill for your $20 gold piece, that does not establish the value of the gold piece for tax purposes.
As mentioned by a poster somewhere upthread, it would make more sense to tax the actual value of the coin when and if the employee sells it as bullion.
In the mean time, as the GP suggested, the guy may be (probably is) in violation of minimum wage laws (unless he wants to say he's bartering with the coins as gold rather than at their face value, in which case the gold value should be taxed--either way, he's probably breaking the law, but different laws)
Of course, it's under GPL so Gnote is within it's rights, but there's a thing called professional courtesy and respecting a developer's wishes.
If it runs faster and takes up less space*, who cares what the Tomboy developers think? May the better app win, I say.
*disclaimer: I have no proof that either of these are true, but it seems likely. If not, then Tomboy ought to thrive and Gnote will probably not gain many users anyway.
A pre-existing condition exclusion is when they say "Sure, we'll take your money, but we won't pay out for any claim based on this condition."
Actually, I described that too. The only insurer that would cover her at all would only do it if they could exclude pretty much everything that could possibly go wrong, plus all the stuff she's already got.
She can't leave Kansas unless she wants to pay 4-5 times as much for a fraction of the coverage she has now. Most insurers won't even take her. The only one that's said it would wanted to charge insane rates and wouldn't cover anything that mattered (her back trouble, any heart problems, many types of cancer, a dozen other things--why even bother, then?), which leaves her with the insanely-expensive and only-slightly-less-worthless state insurance which is--guess what--administered by the same insurance companies, at no risk to themselves.
No break in insurance, but she has to switch if she moves to another state (or even certain regions of the same state). Missouri is where she's moving now, and it looks like she'll be going with the shitty state option. Hope she never gets sick, or my pretty-damn-well-to-do parents will probably be bankrupt in a few years' time.
She also discovered (much to her surprise) that those family history sheets you fill out for the doctor sometimes get passed on to the insurance company. Good thing I know, so now I can stop filling those out. Thanks, American Health Care system! I'm so glad we're sticking it to those dirty socialists!
Now, free medical care for everyone is better how?
Why don't you look at the couple-dozen working, years-to-decades-old, real-world examples and figure it out for yourself? It's not like universal care isn't provided in, oh, every other "first world" country. Loads of data out there.
Theory and ideology are fine. Observation trumps them, though, and we're fortunate to have a wide variety of UHC systems to observe.
Note: the program assumes that you understand how awful our system is compared to those of other comparable countries. If you don't already get that, maybe you should just start with Wikipedia and some Google searches. I'm confident you'll be convinced in short order as I've yet to find anything compelling in favor of our system, and I've looked for it.
The poster to whom I was responding listed a number of customizations that will be impossible with the editor they are releasing. These are customizations that I've seen in numerous other online FPS games.
I'm just saying that if Valve is refraining from allowing deep modifications so that they can have a monopoly on new game modes and such then that's a dick move, given their prior behavior and norms for the FPS modding scene.
I mean, not even being able to create new enemy types (aside from new skins)? That blows.
Hm... maybe they're afraid people will just clone the L4D2 features in L4D1 rather than buying the new game, if they make the editor too full-featured?
Supreme douchebaggery on their part, if that's the case.
Slashdot Mirror
Meh, she'd still accumulate cellular damage and die of cancer eventually. Heart disease would also still be a possibility.
She'd probably die at 85 of pancreatic cancer or something, but look good doing it.
Meh, quests don't work and it barely looks any better since it uses the original textures. The only big improvement I saw was the grass.
Hell, with the right texture mods you can make Morrowind look better than this in its original engine. Which raises another point: even if they got quests working and made higher-res textures, you probably still wouldn't be able to use any of the amazing mods that really bring the Morrowind world to life and increase its replay value enormously.
If I can't have:
- The library outside of the capital that pays to copy your books
- Some of the great companion mods
- The option to play on the Sixth House's side (should have been in the vanilla game, really)
- Slaver Guild/slave-rescuer factions (again, should have been in the vanilla game)
- Extra NPC and NPC schedule mods
- Harder faction progression/higher House joining standards mods
etc, etc, etc
then I'm not interested.
How big's your Netbook hard drive?
If you just need backups and/or quick (but not automatic) access to your files on other systems, consider simple USB flash drives. They're tiny and fairly cheap--I think my 16GB one cost like $30. Even 64GB ones aren't that expensive, and are great for having your data with you everywhere and at all times, with or without a 'net connection. Durable, too, and even pretty damn water resistant (assuming they're not plugged in when they are immersed)
I read Adler's How to Read a Book a couple of years ago. In it, Adler claims that the best text from which to learn a principle is that written by the person who discovered it--so, as you say, you read Euclid's elements for Euclidean geometry, some Archimedes for conic sections, some Lavoisier for chemistry, etc.
My initial reaction on reading this was to reject the idea; after all, why should the person who first discovered something be the best one at conveying the idea to others? That didn't strike me as being necessarily true.
I've continued to struggle with Adler's notions, and I've since decided that I agree, though I'm not sure whether it's for the same reasons as him. Reading Lockhart's paper a few weeks ago and slowly working through E.T. Bell's Men of Mathematics has led me to the conclusion that the raw facts and processes of science and mathematics are often less important for (especially young) students than the processes by which discoveries are made; the way the discoverer came to understand a principle is often more important to grasp than the principle itself.
I'm still not sure if that's what Adler meant (if not, then I still disagree with his reasoning--I don't think he elaborated much on what led him to this conclusion in How to Read a Book) but I've come to agree that the classics in math and science do matter, even if the raw facts and processes are better-described elsewhere.
The big buzz word/trendy strategy in elementary-level teaching right now is "differentiated instruction". What it means is teaching a single concept at several levels of difficulty simultaneously. It's sort of like ability grouping into different classes like you talk about, but all in one classroom and with one teacher (and maybe a TA or Para or some such).
It's actually pretty good when it's done right, but as far as I can tell most elementary school teachers are awful at coming up with effective differentiated lesson plans. Many just think it's impossible and refuse to even try. I expect it to go away in a few years, just like most of the other trendy teaching ideas since, well, forever ago. Maybe we'll move toward having separate ability-grouped classes after it fails.
Bingo, and that's one of the big problems with trying to do anything about the issues the paper raises: there are only so many people with the 1) ability, 2) knowledge, and 3) inclination, to do the kind of real mathematics he's talking about.
We'd have to re-vamp our teacher training along the lines of what's talked about in the paper to try to increase the number of people who could do it, and hope Lockhart's right about this being an art with universal appeal so that enough of the teacher candidates "get" it. Even if elementary schools began using dedicated math teachers (some already do, but many don't) we'd still need a shitload of people trained in this "math as an art/math as play" style, and we currently have approximately zero in elementary education.
... and the cheaters can watch the Super Special ending on Youtube, just like the JRPG gamers who aren't bored enough to do whatever dumb bullshit you need to do (which would usually be impossible to figure out without looking at a guide) to get the super special double-plus happy ending do after they beat the game with the "good, but you didn't find 7 widgets in the Blargle dungeon and spend 40 hours mining Mithryl to turn them in to Super Widgets, so not perfect" ending.
Easily the hardest part of the game, IMO. You can sort-of cheat by leaving your boat up in the cave you come out of, running out until you trigger the chopper, then running back to the boat. You can hide from its guns in the cave and hit it when it drops in to view. Tedious, but less so than dying 10x trying to beat it legitimately.
Personally, I consider it a fair maneuver since the devs gave the chopper a Bin of Infinite Holding for its bombs (it's not long before the damn thing has released more mass and volume worth of bombs than the is in the chopper itself), and made it so much harder to kill than every other identical chopper in the game.
Already have a PS2. Both are getting FFXIII, and the 360 had the new Star Ocean as an exclusive, so that pretty much sealed it. IIRC, the PS3 only has 2-3 exclusive RPGs so far, and I think at least one is a tactical RPG, which is a sub-genre we don't usually play. The couple RPGs on the PS3 that looked to be the best out so far were also available on the 360.
I felt dirty buying it, and despite the fact that it's one of the newer systems I can't shake the feeling that it'll suddenly die on us in a month or two, and I don't really like the controller... but in the end we decided we probably wouldn't use the Blu Ray feature much, and all but 2-3 games we wanted to play were cross-platform or 360 exclusive (guess I'll have to borrow from a friend to play MGS4). No wireless, which sucks. I don't really like the system, but it's where the games are, unfortunately.
I can set up 40GB+ of music to play via a decent-looking web interface for anyone I send a password and URL to in less than a minute and with 5 or 6 clicks using my Facebook account and some shared web hosting? 'Cuz I did that earlier today with Opera Unite.
I went in to this skeptical, and I barely even used Opera before this (I'm a web developer and, though I admire Opera, I need the tools available in Firefox) but it only took about 5 minutes of tinkering with this thing for me to be sold on it. I believe my exact words on testing the media sharing were "whoa, fuckin' cool!"
http://shiftingpixel.com/2008/03/03/smart-image-resizer/
Easy as hell. Auto-caches resized images for future use.
Yeah, the current gen is really lacking for single-machine multiplayer (except the Wii).
Also, as a primarily-PC gamer who just bought his first next-gen system yesterday, I'd like to say:
How can you console gamers put up with this? Expensive hardware, so many confusing options and add-ons, having to keep up with game patches and system updates... ugh, I think I'll just go back to the PC where it's so much simpler :)
Hahaha, damn it felt good to type that.
(for the record, I bought a 360--it would have been a PS3, but my wife loves RPGs and there are way more of them on the 360, which is a total reversal from the last generation)
As mentioned by a poster somewhere upthread, it would make more sense to tax the actual value of the coin when and if the employee sells it as bullion.
In the mean time, as the GP suggested, the guy may be (probably is) in violation of minimum wage laws (unless he wants to say he's bartering with the coins as gold rather than at their face value, in which case the gold value should be taxed--either way, he's probably breaking the law, but different laws)
If it runs faster and takes up less space*, who cares what the Tomboy developers think? May the better app win, I say.
*disclaimer: I have no proof that either of these are true, but it seems likely. If not, then Tomboy ought to thrive and Gnote will probably not gain many users anyway.
Interesting.
Actually, I described that too. The only insurer that would cover her at all would only do it if they could exclude pretty much everything that could possibly go wrong, plus all the stuff she's already got.
Tell that to my mom.
She can't leave Kansas unless she wants to pay 4-5 times as much for a fraction of the coverage she has now. Most insurers won't even take her. The only one that's said it would wanted to charge insane rates and wouldn't cover anything that mattered (her back trouble, any heart problems, many types of cancer, a dozen other things--why even bother, then?), which leaves her with the insanely-expensive and only-slightly-less-worthless state insurance which is--guess what--administered by the same insurance companies, at no risk to themselves.
No break in insurance, but she has to switch if she moves to another state (or even certain regions of the same state). Missouri is where she's moving now, and it looks like she'll be going with the shitty state option. Hope she never gets sick, or my pretty-damn-well-to-do parents will probably be bankrupt in a few years' time.
She also discovered (much to her surprise) that those family history sheets you fill out for the doctor sometimes get passed on to the insurance company. Good thing I know, so now I can stop filling those out. Thanks, American Health Care system! I'm so glad we're sticking it to those dirty socialists!
Why don't you look at the couple-dozen working, years-to-decades-old, real-world examples and figure it out for yourself? It's not like universal care isn't provided in, oh, every other "first world" country. Loads of data out there.
Theory and ideology are fine. Observation trumps them, though, and we're fortunate to have a wide variety of UHC systems to observe.
I recommend you start by watching this.
Note: the program assumes that you understand how awful our system is compared to those of other comparable countries. If you don't already get that, maybe you should just start with Wikipedia and some Google searches. I'm confident you'll be convinced in short order as I've yet to find anything compelling in favor of our system, and I've looked for it.
I doubt I'd recall something so trivial, any more than I'd recall what I had for breakfast on a certain day 6 months ago.
Would you recall? If you used one sometimes and another other times? On a specific day a year ago?
I mean, if you're gonna call that perjury you might as well call the "not guilty" plea perjury, too.
"I don't recall"
You mean all 4 Dune books.
The poster to whom I was responding listed a number of customizations that will be impossible with the editor they are releasing. These are customizations that I've seen in numerous other online FPS games.
I'm just saying that if Valve is refraining from allowing deep modifications so that they can have a monopoly on new game modes and such then that's a dick move, given their prior behavior and norms for the FPS modding scene.
I mean, not even being able to create new enemy types (aside from new skins)? That blows.
Hm... maybe they're afraid people will just clone the L4D2 features in L4D1 rather than buying the new game, if they make the editor too full-featured?
Supreme douchebaggery on their part, if that's the case.
Except owning a disc sucks and has inherent risks that Steam does not~